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- Convenors:
-
Gertraud Koch
(Universität Hamburg)
Samantha Lutz (University of Hamburg)
Isto Huvila (Uppsala University)
Maria Economou (University of Glasgow)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Digital Lives
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 22 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
Digital media ecologies promise to open-up established knowledge orders by providing new modes of participation and publicness. However, participatory memory making did not emerge by itself for people in vulnerable social situations. The panel explores modalities for opening-up memory making.
Long Abstract:
Digital media ecologies open-up publics for articulations of people and groups beyond the established institutions. They promise to break with traditional knowledge hierarchies by providing new modes of participation and publicness. However, participatory memory making for people and groups in vulnerable social situations did not emerge by itself through the re-mediation of memories, which emerges from digitalization with its particular capacity for representing, sharing and sustaining knowledge (including emotional, practical and tacit knowing). Being aware of the fact that culture may cultivate integrative or disruptive forces, establishing inclusive politics of heritage for envisioning possible futures has become a key issue in memory making. Building on the rich knowledge on participation in memory making, we thus want to move on and explore the wide array of modalities, in which mediated memories contribute to opening-up established knowledge orders in public memory.
This panel invites contributions on how memory modalities open-up established knowledge orders and foster social inclusive, future envisioning memory making. We seek to discover and inquire which organisational settings, discourses, business models and finances, cultural economies, legal frameworks or potential other modalities facilitate accessibility, agency and motivation of people and groups to partake in public memory making. Being part of the public memory is important for envisioning positive possible futures acknowledging people's and groups' history, identity, belonging, and membership, in questions of eligibility for public support or redemption, for partaking in economic outcomes or questions of ownership of cultural heritage resources.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 22 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
How to implement participatory memory practices is an ongoing debate in the heritage sector. The H2020 ITN POEM is addressing this by training a cohort of professionals through a novel approach and set of methodologies to understand the changing memory modalities in digital media ecologies.
Paper long abstract:
Digital media ecologies have the potential to break traditional hierarchies of knowledge production and ownership. They can achieve this by providing novel opportunities for new and more diverse communities to engage in memory making with both institutional actors and with each other. However, harnessing this potential to bring a positive change and potential benefits for previously marginalised and underrepresented communities, and the society as a whole, requires a systematic consideration and understanding of how traditional and novel memory modalities operate in the digital media sphere. The H2020 Marie Curie ITN on Participatory Memory Practices (POEM) is making a major contribution in this area by training a cohort of heritage, media, and research professionals through the development of a structured approach and set of methodologies for explicating and systematising understanding of the changing regimes of memory modalities in digital media ecologies. This paper discusses the process of developing the POEM approach, methodological toolbox and transdisciplinary Community of Practice. These are employed for an in-depth and systematic examination of how memory making is being reshaped as a result of the changing socio-technical, organisational, legal, economic, and ethical frameworks for the use of cultural materials in a digitally mediated world. POEM is addressing an urgent need for training experts in the cultural heritage sector who understand these new modalities, changing frameworks and contexts and can harness them to empower people and develop socially inclusive memory practices.
Paper short abstract:
Constructing memory in digital spaces requires selection and deployment of various tools and file formats. This paper examines a case study, drawn from video game fandom, where non-professional communities publish archival materials via Web using lossy digital formats to increase accessibility.
Paper long abstract:
Born-digital cultural objects are central to the construction of memory and identity in digital spaces, but access to these resources is limited by technical knowledge and resources. As a result, enthusiasts and self-appointed preservationists frequently use newer technological platforms in order to increase access to cultural resources in the form of lossy digital formats, prioritizing accessibility over fidelity.
The unreleased video game Sonic X-Treme, cancelled in 1997 and designed for the discontinued Sega Saturn home gaming console, is presented as a case study. Since its cancellation, enthusiasts and developers alike have preserved and published digital assets from the defunct project in a complex array of interrelated digital objects that rely on computing platforms including not only Sega’s Saturn, but also MS-DOS, Windows 95, and image standards including, DeluxePaint .ANM, and ZASoft Corporation’s .PCX. By surveying the living ecosystem of related objects online today, this paper shows enthusiast communities converting objects from production-oriented formats like .ANM and .PCX to web-friendly formats like .GIF and .JPG.
By presenting a formal analysis of the digital materials published within communities of video game enthusiasts, this paper shows the specific priorities at play in non-professional memory workers’ practices preserving born-digital cultural heritage. The paper concludes with a comparison across other examples, illustrating the prominence of similar practices.
Paper short abstract:
Misplaced or intentionally avoided, some cherished photographic objects can take on a hauntographic presence – retaining an affective charge that echoes the very phantoms they were meant to commemorate.
Paper long abstract:
Like memory, photographs have a connection to the past that is reconsidered with each viewing. Bereavement can render this imaginative component of the photographic experience more conspicuous. Longing for cross-temporal, sustained connections, some individuals – the bereaved in particular – form relationships with photographic portraits of otherwise inaccessible individuals. Lavished with special attention, cherished photographic objects capture more than a fleeting moment – they have the ability to speak across time. Reintegrating the likeness of absent individuals into the present, some photographs become so enmeshed in the activity of imaginative remembrance that their ability to participate is no longer dependant on the viewable object. Misplaced or intentionally avoided, these mementoes can take on a hauntographic presence – retaining an affective charge that echoes the very phantoms they were meant to commemorate.
The bereavement activity occurring on social media represents an exciting move towards the reinstallation of death within society. Photography-based commemorative activities are also experiencing a revival – both in their production and in their public sharing within spaces of social media. Isolated from others, many currently grieve diminished connections to living individuals. Relationships are increasingly experienced through screens and there is an urgent need to deepen our understanding of grieving in conjunction with photographic portraits. This paper examines various forms of embellishment that integrate the likeness of absent individuals into a common temporal frame with the bereaved. Introducing and developing the concept of hauntography, this project follows the imagination’s role in remembrance as it moves through the photographic medium.
Paper short abstract:
This paper sheds light on how users of online museum archives pervade digital and physical spaces through recreating historic artefacts and garments.Curation of digital images and the enactment of tacit knowledge through craftsmanship become entangled in the creation of new kinds of memory practice.
Paper long abstract:
For several years, museums and heritage institutions all over the world have been, and still are, heavily invested in digitizing their collections and making them accessible online. These archives offer online visitors the opportunity to browse museums' collections at any time and use them for different purposes. My research within the DFG-funded research project "Curating Digital Images: Ethnographic Perspectives on the Affordances of Digital Images in Heritage and Museum Contexts" is concerned with how and for what reasons visitors interact with these archives. I apply ethnographic methods to understand how digital images transform the museum experience of online visitors. Through careful observation, participation and interviews, I shed light on how the curation of digital images in everyday life creates personal, emotional, practical, and tacit knowledge.
In this paper, I will take a closer look at how such curatorial practices pervade digital and physical spaces, especially through embodied memory practices enacted through craftsmanship. When digital images serve to (re)-create and wear or use historic artefacts and garments, digital media and physical spaces blend into one another: Historic physical objects get digitized, are shared and discussed online with other agents, and then find their way back into physical spaces, bodily practices and material objects. In this way, new memory modalities emerge in-between physical and digital spaces by way of understanding and feeling historic material properties and thus making sense of historic living conditions and cultures.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on a fieldwork on Russian online communities of nostalgic soviet ex-citizens, my paper will question how users interact in specific ways with digital affordances to build a collective memorial device.
Paper long abstract:
My paper aims to explore how digital spaces enable participatory mnemonic practices. Drawing on a fieldwork on Russian online communities of nostalgic soviet ex-citizens, I will question how users interact in specific ways with digital affordances to build a collective memorial device. By looking at the detailed practices of online memory organization, I aim at understanding how digital artefacts, in both their textual and visual dimensions, come to be used as constitutive mediations in the activity of remembering. By translating fragments of a common past into a shared public material, nostalgic representations allow users to dive into soviet time and perform metaphorical continuity above irreversibility of the past time and place. They help soviet ex-citizens, whose homeland vanished from the map, to gather and to resist collectively to the feeling of loss. I will argue that such mediations are not merely cultural symbols, that subtend mnemonic fixation, but are also socially elaborated triggers for individual remembering. Moreover, I will show that the interplay between digital forms and memorial artefacts shapes the production of a commemorative place, structured by different levels of narration: on the timeline, a constructed flow of unintentional remembering; in the photo albums, a space of storage that classifies the traces of the past; and in the discussion forums, an arena for critical history interpretation or a medium for autobiographical narratives. Finally, my fieldwork illustrates how connective turn created new modes of commemoration and knowledge of the past for memory agents, both as groups and individuals.